This 69th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test Question—Phonological Patterns

The following pronunciations are found among non-native speakers of English sharing the same native language:

strong	[səˈtrɒŋ]
six	[ˈsɪkəs]
excuse	[ˌekəsəˈkjuːz]
pleased	[ˈpliːzəd]

What features of the speakers’ native language would the data allow you to infer?

Answers

• They are fond of using the phoneme /ə/.

• Syllable boundaries. It is strongly syllabic. There should be a minimum phonemes in a syllable, because of soronity.

• It is possible that the native language probably has many syllables and the schwa vowel. It does not have plosive and/or fricative sound. This is because it is possible to choose among different symbols to indicate precise phonetic quality, in a phonemic transcription.

• The language consists of many short syllables which include a consonant and vowel, such that they see a need to return to a sort of neutral vowel /ə/ after every consonant, and find it difficult to pronounce a string of alveolar and velar consonants in one smooth flow.

• This applies for syllables that can be pronounced in our language, English. To pronounce foreign words, they inject a shwa after stressed syllables.

• In syllables where vowels are absent, the /ə/ is added and the silent [e] sound English is not silent in the situation of the above speaker. Word stress occurs in the native language and it is also possible that all syllables in the native language consist of at least one vowel.

• The schwa is added after all plosives and fricative that are not followed by a non-neutral vowel or approximates.

• The language’s stress pattern is on its vowels where /ə/ represents the natural class of vowels in the Vowel Quadrilateral. The words strong and excuse act as examples to the analysis whilst six and pleased further supports it.

• The speakers tend to use additional sounds such as ə and creating more syllables than required. They rarely have single syllable words.

• /ə/s are added between consonants and /s/, /x/ is always pronounced /kəs/ and /s/ if the onset becomes voiced. /ə/s would appear between /s/ and consonants.

• The phonemology of the language may have more syllables in a word than other languages.

• These speakers are not willing to pronounce words properly. They do the opposite of Standard English which is what the environment requires.

More to come...

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